--- title: Race to the rock author: nige date: '2018-09-19' cover: "IMG_1806.JPG" categories: - Bike - R tags: - dotwatcher - mapprogress - racetotherock - data ---

Race to the rock

“It’s safer, less painful and less soul destroying to remain a dot watcher.”

With those words for inspiration, this post takes dot watching several levels too far.

For an introduction to Race to the Rock perhaps read about the first 2016 ride. Race to the rock happened again in 2017 and 2018. There’s an active online community serving up a constant stream of visual inspiration. This post is a little different, but hopefully adds another tasty tidbit to the race-to-the-rock soup.

Each rider carries a live gps tracker that, in combination with map progress website, provides easily accessible data. Roughly each 10 minutes you can find out where the rider was, the distance covered since the last data point and a few other bits of information. (The full data for 2018 is available here). Raw data shows what this raw data looks like. Some quick summary stats:

What other insights can the dot watcher gain from playing with these data…


Distance

Figure 1 shows the cumulative distance by date. The purple dot is consistent!

Cumulative distance travelled by the four finishers

Figure 1: Cumulative distance travelled by the four finishers


Speeds

Figure 2 shows the distribution of speed in km/h. This is the average speed over each (roughly) 10 minute interval between data points. The singlespeeder certainly had a more pointy distribution than the other riders. And perhaps spent a lot of time walking (about 5 km/h) in the first week?

Erinn seemed to find a bit more top-end speed than the others, with 27 intervals above 30 km/h vs 7 for Sarah, 14 for Nick and 2 for Emma.

Distribution of speed

Figure 2: Distribution of speed


Stoping times

Sarah spent much more time moving than the other finishers!

Total stopping time

Figure 3: Total stopping time


Map

Mapping the speed by each data point results in the following maps. The map is set to zoom on about Leigh Creek, but you can pan/zoom anywhere.


Thanks for making it this far…

And at the end of all those dots - the rock for the few who have finished!

View this post on Instagram

(Now that shes asleep) there was someone who I purposely left out, and left to last to thank. Always from the start she was supportive, and instead of talking me out of something that seemed crazy she encouraged and is excited. She spent the weeks looking after Trent, which is no mean feat. Left me with a letter to read when times seemed too tough (stole that idea from @rupert.guinness ) which I did read in the 37 degree, 50kph headwinds of William Creek. I broke down in tears when I finished reading it. And above all, took the time off work and flew herself here just to cheer me over the line. I'm so lucky to have her in my life, and every day I look back to how she had turned my world upside down. Love Nick x

A post shared by Nick ‘the scary jew’ Skarajew (@the_scary_jew) on


Raw data

The following table shows the first few records for each rider. If the table options are hard to see, press the lightbulb at the top-right of the page to switch to ‘light’ mode.


Acknowledgements